Construct · 4 fields · 5 citations
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The retrospective process by which people in an organization turn ongoing experience into words and so account for what has surprised them. Weick set out the account in Sensemaking in Organizations in 1995: sensemaking is grounded in identity, retrospective, enactive of the environments people then face, social, ongoing, cued by extracted moments, and organized around plausibility rather than accuracy. Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld restated it in 2005 as the activity through which the flux of organizational circumstance is turned into situations that are comprehended explicitly in words and that serve as a springboard into action. The unit is a stream of organizational experience, not a person's trait, and the question is how meaning is imposed after the fact, not how information is found.[1][2]
How a person bridges a gap to move through a situation, the central image of Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. Dervin models any moment of information use as a person stopped by a discontinuity, a gap, on the way through a situation toward an outcome, who then builds a bridge of ideas, questions, and feelings in order to cross it. The 1998 overview presents the methodology as a way to study information seeking and use from the standpoint of the user rather than the system, and its interviews reconstruct the situation, the gap, and the bridging move for each stopped moment. Sensemaking here is a person's gap-bridging in the course of seeking information, not an organization's account of surprise.[3]
The analyst's iterative loop of foraging for information and structuring it into a defensible judgment. Pirolli and Card built the model in 2005 from a cognitive task analysis of intelligence analysts, and described two nested loops: a foraging loop that searches, filters, and reads source material, and a sensemaking loop that schematizes the evidence, builds and tests hypotheses, and presents a case. The process runs both bottom up from data toward a hypothesis and top down from a hypothesis back to the data, and the paper's purpose is to locate leverage points where software could help. Sensemaking here names a stage in an analyst's workflow, the structuring of foraged evidence, not a retrospective account or a personal gap.[4]
The process of fitting data to a frame and revising the frame as new data arrive, the data-frame theory of Klein, Moon, and Hoffman. Writing in 2006 for the naturalistic decision making tradition, they defined sensemaking as a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections among people, places, and events in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively. A frame is an explanatory structure, a story, map, or script, that defines which data count; the data in turn prompt people to elaborate, question, or discard the frame. The account is deliberately narrower than Weick's: it concerns how experts construct and revise explanations at the point of decision, and Klein and colleagues treat it as distinct from situation awareness and from creativity.[5]
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